


And I Got My Heart And I'm in a Fire

by mytimehaspassed



Series: And I Got My Heart [1]
Category: Revenge - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-08
Updated: 2012-01-08
Packaged: 2017-10-29 05:08:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nolan meets Tyler through a friend of a friend of an ex-employee at a charity gala governed by Victoria Grayson and her frozen smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And I Got My Heart And I'm in a Fire

**AND I GOT MY HEART AND I'M IN A FIRE**  
REVENGE  
Nolan/Tyler; Daniel/Tyler; (implied) Tyler/OCs  
 **WARNINGS** : AU  
 **NOTES** : This is part one of a (probably) two part series.

 

Nolan meets Tyler through a friend of a friend of an ex-employee at a charity gala governed by Victoria Grayson and her frozen smile. The woman on Nolan’s arm hovers her mouth over the woman on Tyler’s arm’s cheek, her voice straight and thin, and Tyler misses all of this and holds out his palm warmly to Nolan, flashing his white teeth and bright eyes. And he’s young and stupid and almost thoroughly Nolan’s type.

“Hi,” Tyler says, and Nolan watches the women beside them talk vacantly at each other.

“How about a drink?” Nolan asks, and spreads his fingers across the small of Tyler’s back to steer him towards the bar.

“Sure,” Tyler says, leaning back against Nolan’s hand.

***

Nolan spends three hundred dollars on fruity blue-colored cocktails that get Tyler so obliterated that he kisses Nolan against the door of Victoria Grayson’s pool house, fumbling with the handle until it gives way and they both stumble inside.

(Later, Nolan will realize that he could have skipped the pretense and asked Tyler back to his place for a quick fuck and Tyler would have smiled and said yes because he had plans from the moment he saw Nolan enter the party, or maybe even before that, when Tyler was searching for another mark in the lifestyles section of the Wall Street Journal, where Nolancorp has spreads practically every week.)

Tyler bucks under Nolan’s weight and Nolan pulls back to ask him if this is okay, and they make it to the bed in the middle of the room, and it looks immaculate and untouched, and Tyler grips Nolan’s lapels and tugs him back onto the duvet cover, and they roll around with Nolan’s mouth touching every part of Tyler’s skin, and Tyler moans in an unabashed, uncontrolled way, and Nolan grins with his teeth, and every part of this is better than the last part, and neither of them tells the other to stop.

(Later, much later, Nolan will realize that he could have slipped a few hundred dollar bills into Tyler’s jacket pocket and slid smooth out of the wrinkled sheets before he woke up and that might have been the end of it.)

Instead, Nolan writes his number on Tyler’s sweaty palm with an eyeliner pencil he found in the bathroom, looping the numbers thick and black around Tyler’s thumb. “I have a phone, you know,” Tyler says, and nods towards his jacket slumped somewhere on the floor, and Nolan laughs and leans down one more time to kiss him.

“Call me,” he says, and doesn’t look back.

***

It takes a few weeks and three clipped texts before Tyler calls Nolan from a payphone just outside of Long Island in a place where apparently they still have pay phones, grimy blue boxes sandwiched between a Starbucks and a drugstore, and when Nolan comes to pick him up, he’s wearing jeans and a hoodie and a shining black eye. Nolan doesn’t ask what happened when Tyler slips into the backseat beside him, but he does tell his driver to worm his way into traffic somewhere nice and noticeable, pressing the button to slide up the partition between them.

“You sure know how to make friends,” Nolan says, and Tyler looks at him, and Nolan notices that he has a fat lip, as well. He holds Tyler’s chin in his hand and turns his face to the side, and the bruises around his eye are so black it makes Nolan’s stomach turn.

“I’m sorry,” Tyler says, and Nolan’s not sure why. His voice is hoarse and maybe Nolan’s meant to think that he’s been yelling or crying or something, but he can’t imagine the boy who laughed and moaned and begged underneath him doing any of those things. “I probably shouldn’t have called you. That was stupid.”

“No,” Nolan says, and means it. “No, it’s okay. What do you need?”

Tyler draws in a deep breath and Nolan watches him try to stop his hands from shaking. “Leslie,” Tyler starts and then stops and then breathes in, and then starts again. “It’s not like he meant to do this, really. It’s not his fault.”

Nolan doesn’t say anything for a moment, but he feels his fingers start to curl into fists, and something about this seems really out of control, something about this seems really not like him, and he’s not sure when he graduated from Nolan Ross: Billionaire Playboy to Nolan Ross: Someone Who Really Gives a Fuck, and Tyler looks at him like he doesn’t know if Nolan will hurt or help, and Nolan wants to help him so badly he can taste it in the back of his throat.

“Hey,” he says, and places his hand flush against Tyler’s warm cheek. Tyler closes his eyes, and Nolan feels nothing if not lost. “I’ll fix this.”

Tyler doesn’t say thank you, but that might be because he presses his swollen mouth to Nolan’s instead, slipping his tongue past Nolan’s lips. Nolan presses back.

***

(Later, much later, Nolan will ask Tyler if there ever was a Leslie, and Tyler will look away for a moment, and his eyes will be cold and lifeless when he looks back, and he will say that, yes, there was a Leslie a long time ago, when Tyler was nothing, when Tyler was young and uncouth and unmolded and so, so fucking stupid that it hurt. Nolan will lift his mouth up in a perfect, poised smile, and ask if Leslie meant as little to him as Nolan did, and Tyler will swallow and say nothing, and the silence will be harder for Nolan to stomach than any one of Tyler’s lies.)

***

Tyler moves into the spare bedroom but spends every night naked under Nolan’s sheets, flush and wild and alive. Sometimes they talk, with Tyler’s naked arms brushing against Nolan’s naked arms, their gaze aligned together towards the crisp white ceiling, and sometimes they don’t, Nolan’s body pulsing in time with Tyler’s body, their mouths slick and wet and used. And sometimes Nolan will drop a soft kiss onto Tyler’s forehead when Tyler is asleep and wonder what happened to his one night stand only policy because this feels like everything he never wanted, this feels like everything he tried to avoid.

Tyler doesn’t tell him about his life before Leslie, who he barely mentions anyway, who Nolan tried to find but couldn’t because either Tyler was very careful or because Tyler was very forgettable, and Nolan let himself get close to hacking into Tyler’s personal records once, could feel his fingers start to itch at the thought, but wouldn’t let himself do it for reasons he couldn’t even begin to describe, and maybe that’s when things started to spiral out of his control, and maybe that’s when he decided to fuck everything up.

***

Tyler somehow manages to get them into a club Nolan’s never been to before, and in the dark, recessed lighting, Nolan feels overdressed and out of place, even with Tyler’s hand steady on Nolan’s hand, even with Tyler looking back at him and smiling wide. Nolan buys a round of drinks that cost more than two months’ rent of his first New York apartment, and Tyler finds a table back in the corner somewhere a little more private, and Nolan kisses the back of Tyler’s ear when Tyler turns, and Tyler slides his hand over Nolan’s thigh, and it’s certainly not the Hamptons here, because nobody even spares them a glance. It takes two more rounds of something smooth and strong that comes in little green shot glasses and slips cold down Nolan’s throat before Tyler takes him by the hand and leads him to the bathroom, pushing him into the dirty handicapped stall at the end.

Nolan can still hear the pulse of the music outside, the tremble of the bass that shakes the walls, and Tyler smiles against Nolan’s mouth, and says, “Here.” He opens his palm to show Nolan two little white pills, and Nolan rolls his eyes.

“I don’t do party favors,” he says, moving forward so his lips brush over Tyler’s ear. Someone outside the stall turns the facet on and then turns it off, humming something familiar.

“C’mon,” Tyler says, and places one pill on his tongue. He opens his mouth and Nolan can’t see any farther than Tyler’s pink lips, Tyler’s white teeth. “Please,” Tyler says, and it’s muffled with his tongue out.

Nolan can see the want on Tyler’s face, the naked hunger when Tyler looks at Nolan and when Nolan looks back, and there’s nothing here that Nolan can build a life on, nothing here that Nolan can see lasting past the sex and drinks and drugs, but part of him (a really, really big part of him) doesn’t care.

“Okay,” he says, whispering it against Tyler’s cheek, and Tyler smiles and turns and Nolan pushes their tongues together. Tyler lifts his hands up to Nolan’s hair and Nolan grips the back of Tyler’s jacket and somebody outside clears their throat and flushes the toilet and Tyler laughs somewhere near Nolan’s chin and pulls back.

Nolan moves his head too fast and feels himself slow down and he wants to ask what Tyler gave him but he doesn’t want to be uncool about it, so he just says, “Take care of me, okay?”

And Tyler says, “Always,” and his smile is catching in the soft glow.

Nolan grabs at Tyler’s shirt and feels the soft material under his fingers and wants so badly to just take him home right now and devour him inch by inch, just spend hours kissing every part of Tyler’s body, each and every dimple and crease and joint, but Tyler has other plans by the look of it, because he’s pulling Nolan out of the stall and out of the bathroom and into the club, his palm warm and pliant against Nolan’s.

Tyler snags two drinks off a passing tray when the bartender isn’t looking, and Nolan downs his quick enough to gasp and Tyler shakes his head at the trembling circle of Nolan’s lips and the light makes a halo of his hair and Nolan feels his mouth go dry. And Tyler leads Nolan onto the dance floor before Nolan can even begin to protest, curving his way through the clutter of boys and girls.

“I’m gonna have to teach you how to dance one of these days,” Tyler half shouts, half laughs into Nolan’s ear over the throbbing music when Nolan starts to sway against him. “I can’t believe your parents never made you take lessons.”

Tyler’s wide-eyed and happy and Nolan forgets how terrible he is at this kind of thing, this going out and being social and not checking email or voicemail or text messages for two minutes because it’s just Tyler and it’s just him, and they’re here and it’s everything he needs. Nolan moves flush against Tyler, moves close enough to feel every muscle and sinew and bone and Tyler presses his nose into Nolan’s neck and Nolan can’t remember the last time he did anything this unfettered, can’t remember the last time he ever felt this alive.

“Not for this kind of music, anyway,” Nolan says, as the track switches to something with an echoing chorus and synced up drum machine. He feels something inside of him flutter up and down, something inside of him that wants to get out. He leans against Tyler and he feels heavy and wrong. “Whoa,” he says.

“Hey, baby, you okay?” Tyler asks, and Nolan forgets what it feels like to swallow, forgets what it feels like to breathe, and something inside of him is swelling up and up and up and none of this feels like what it should be and none of this feels okay. “Nolan?”

And the last thing Nolan remembers before he doesn’t remember anything at all is that he never saw Tyler take the other pill.

***

(Nolan has brief, vivid memories of Tyler that he can’t place.

He remembers Tyler on his computer and he remembers Tyler placing cold fingers over his forehead, smoothing the hair out of his eyes, and he remembers Tyler talking on the phone with clipped, terse language that Nolan has never heard him use before and he remembers Tyler pressing his lips to the corner of Nolan’s mouth, saying something soft and useless that Nolan couldn’t hear, and, later, much later, he remembers Tyler telling him to go back to sleep because it was all just a bad dream.

And, later, much later, he remembers Tyler telling him that he was sorry.)

***

When Nolan wakes up, Tyler gives him a worried smile. “Hey,” he says, and his voice is light and Nolan knows something is wrong.

He rolls over and he’s in bed and he doesn’t remember how he got there and he thinks he must have really gotten wasted last night to be this forgetful, and he shakes his head and it starts to throb, and Tyler kisses him on the forehead and Nolan reaches up to catch his wrist and pull him into a real kiss, and Tyler’s mouth feels warm and inviting. “What happened last night?”

Tyler looks away and then looks back, and Nolan feels something flutter around in his stomach, something bad. “I gave you something,” Tyler says, and Nolan sees the flash of a little white pill on Tyler’s pink palm, but he shakes his head again and the image is gone. “I’m so sorry, Nolan,” Tyler says, and he buries his nose somewhere in Nolan’s hair. “I only wanted you to have a good time.”

“How long have I been out?” Nolan asks, hoarsely, and his tongue feels like sandpaper in his mouth.

“About fourteen hours,” Tyler says, and Nolan looks up sharply and regrets it almost instantly. “Shit, I’m sorry, Nolan, you must feel awful.”

Nolan winces at that and the wave of nausea that suddenly rolls over him, and he can feel Tyler press a kiss on the side of his face, and he feels like he’s missing something that’s standing right in front of him. He swallows dryly, and takes in a deep breath, and his head feels like he’s just stuffed it full of cotton, and Tyler keeps his mouth centered above Nolan’s ear, even though Nolan can barely feel it. The image of everything that happened last night after he swallowed the pill remains just out of reach, blurred, and Nolan wants to ask Tyler, but the words won’t push past his throat.

He smiles weakly, and says, “Told you I didn’t do party favors,” and Tyler laughs, muffled, but it’s not happy. “It’s okay,” Nolan whispers, and he threads his fingers through Tyler’s, even though he knows there’s something there that Tyler’s not telling him, even though he knows there’s something there that just doesn’t seem right.

“It’s okay,” he says again, and Tyler leans down to distract him from saying anything else.

***

Nolan sets up hidden video cameras inside every room of his house and he’s not entirely sure why.

He watches Tyler shower and he watches Tyler turn on the TV and he watches Tyler make phone calls that the speakers don’t catch and he watches Tyler undress him in the middle of the kitchen and fuck him on top of the island, scattering utensils and pots and bowls everywhere. Tyler makes sixteen phone calls in the week after he gave Nolan the drug, makes them when Nolan’s asleep or at work or when Tyler pretends to go to the bathroom, letting the facet run over his words.

Nolan checks the browser history on his laptop and finds that it’s been erased, which is strange because Nolan’s never been shy about where he’s been, so he sets up a keystroke logger and pretends to leave early for a meeting one morning, having Big Ed drive him to the South Fork Inn where he orders room service and watches Tyler betray him over the wireless video feed.

He watches Tyler set up a transfer from Nolan’s personal bank to another account somewhere offshore where the possibility of getting it back is next to zero. He watches Tyler make a phone call to someone he never addresses, and he watches Tyler hang up and text somebody. Nolan’s phone buzzes next to him and he almost can’t make himself look at it, but he does anyway, because something inside of him is numb, something inside of him has stopped working, and he can’t quite figure out why he cares so much for somebody who obviously cares so little for him, and he can’t quite figure out why it’s cutting him this deep.

Tyler texts him, Miss u, with a little smiley face beside it, and Nolan almost doesn’t make it to the bathroom before he vomits, his face red and burning hot against the cold toilet seat.

***

“You could have just asked,” Nolan says when Tyler comes back from wherever he fucked off to. The sun has long set and Nolan has been sitting in his bedroom for three hours waiting for Tyler to come home, waiting for something, anything, to happen, and he feels weak and he feels fucking stupid, and when Tyler turns on the light beside the bed, his eyes shine in the glow like he’s just been crying.

“What?” Tyler asks, and he smiles, but it falters when Nolan doesn’t smile back, and Nolan watches the emotions flicker across Tyler’s face, watches the lies run through his mind.

“The sixty thousand you’ve been transferring over in small increments since you came here,” Nolan says, and his mouth is one thin, straight line. “Sixty thousand is pocket change to anyone who lives out here, especially me. I would have given it to you a while ago; you could have avoided all of this.”

“Nolan,” Tyler starts, and he looks like he just got his hand caught in the cookie jar, and Nolan can’t deal with this right now, so he holds up his palm.

“No,” he says. “Not anymore, Ty.” Nolan watches Tyler’s mouth start to quiver, watches his eyes start to swell, and he wants to tell him that it’s fucking bullshit if he thinks crying will help him, because Nolan’s done enough of that for the both of them. “If you need any more, you can contact my accountant. I’m sure he will be more than happy to set something up. Off the record, I promise.”

“Nolan, please,” Tyler says, and Nolan is dangerously close to losing his cool, and he can feel the adrenaline running through him like electricity. “I can explain.”

“I’m sure you can,” Nolan sighs, and he places two fingers against his forehead, pressing down on the growing stem of a headache. “I just really don’t want to hear it. Please leave before I have to call Big Ed up here. He might be a little more enthusiastic at throwing you out than you would want.”

“Where am I supposed to go?” Tyler asks.

Nolan laughs, and it’s the bitterest sound he’s ever made. “I know this has all just been a game to you, Tyler, so you must realize by now that you’ve lost.” He stands up and walks towards him, and Tyler takes a visible step back, his eyes wide and hurt. “And I really don’t give a shit where you go from here.” Nolan strokes his fingers over Tyler’s cheekbone and it hurts more than anything. “Now get the fuck out of my house.”

***

Nolan takes a long overdue vacation from the board meetings he never attends and flies to a remote island off the coast of the Pacific for a few weeks. On the way there, he fucks two of the flight attendants at the same time and gets drunk off those little mini bottles of liquor, and nobody tells him to stop because he tips them all in crisp one hundred dollar bills, and nobody asks him what’s wrong because, frankly, nobody cares, and it’s perfect because he finally feels like he’s gaining back control of his life.

Somewhere between the plane and the hotel, he manages to lose his phone, which is just as well because he couldn’t seem to stop himself from checking the last voicemail Tyler had left him, and if he heard Tyler’s voice call him baby one more time, he might have done something entirely stupid like try to call him back.

***

He’s back for two days when he finally gets up the nerve to meet with his accountant and ask how much money Tyler took out while he was gone.

He wears dark sunglasses and nobody mentions the bruises around his knuckles and he swallows down coffee like its water and his accountant looks at him like he’s finally lost it. “Tyler who?” He asks, and Nolan coughs at the name.

Nolan pushes the sunglasses farther up his nose and his accountant tells him that if there was a Tyler with a legitimate claim to any of Nolan’s money, he never made himself known. Nolan swallows and thanks him and tries not to break down in the florescent lit corner office.

***

His first search for Tyler Barrol gets him nowhere.

His second brings him marginally closer, with records from the outrageously expensive private boarding school that little Tyler was sent to in the third grade after he was expelled from four other elementary schools.

His third brings him to a scorned West Coast therapist whose notes read like a who’s who of Hollywood, and who, apparently, was doing a lot more than just listening during Tyler’s sessions. Nolan watches the first five tapes before he has to turn it off, if only because watching the guy slide his hands over Tyler in the same place that Nolan’s hands had been was making his stomach turn. The therapist prescribed enough anti-psychotics to make Tyler open and pliant to his touch, and it was working until it wasn’t anymore, and the last noteworthy session has Tyler threatening to tell anybody who would listen unless he got enough money to send him far away.

His fourth search finds a brother that works as a doctor in some upstanding hospital, and Nolan feels tempted to call him and pretend to be somebody he’s not so he can ask about Tyler and where he might be, but that feels stupid even for him.

His fifth leads him to Daniel Grayson.

***

If anybody asks, Daniel likes to say that he and Tyler met at college, but both he and Nolan know that that’s not quite true. Nolan sits across from Daniel in a corner booth of The Stowaway and they both order beers and greasy burgers and Daniel looks tanned and expensive and Nolan is still wearing his dark sunglasses inside, if only because he feels naked without them. Daniel takes a bite and swallows before Nolan says anything, so Nolan just raises an eyebrow and waits.

“We met at a bar,” Daniel says. At a gay bar, Daniel doesn’t say. “Ty had just dropped out because he couldn’t afford the tuition.”

Nolan picks at his burger, swallowing his beer down in three gulps, watching Daniel watch him. “So you offered to pay it for him in exchange for, what?”

Daniel coughs nervously, and then leans over the table so he’s closer to Nolan. “Look, I know you know my dad and everything, but this is just between us, right?”

Nolan rolls his eyes, but Daniel doesn’t see it behind his glasses. “Yes,” he says, exasperated. “Your little foray into homosexuality is just between me, you, and this horrible food.”

Daniel leans back, satisfied, and his mouth straightens. “I was confused,” he says, shrugging. “Ty helped me with a few things. It was easier to figure it out in a place where nobody knows you’re the prodigal son of Conrad and Victoria Grayson, you know?”

“Yeah, it’s very heart warming,” Nolan says, and throws his napkin on the table. “But why aren’t you guys still friends?”

Daniel looks uncomfortable and Nolan feels the urge to shake him welling up in his fists. “Like I said, I was confused and Tyler helped me figure out that that wasn’t what I wanted. But, after a while, he started wanting more than I could give him.”

“Money?” Nolan takes his glasses off to pinch the bridge of his nose.

“No,” Daniel says, and Nolan looks surprised at that. “No, he told me that he would give the money all back if I would just go away with him.”

Nolan falls silent at that and Daniel looks down sadly at his plate. “What happened when you told him no?”

Daniel doesn’t look up and Nolan feels something inside of him move, feels something inside of him still. “He didn’t take it that well.” Daniels pushes food around with his fork. “We got into a fight.”

That would explain the bruises when Nolan came to pick him up, Nolan doesn’t say. Either Tyler didn’t want to explain how he knew Daniel Grayson, or there really was a good guy buried deep somewhere inside of him that didn’t want to out Daniel to the entire Hamptons society.

“He disappeared before I could apologize.” Daniel looks back up at Nolan and Nolan can see that he means it. “I never meant for it to end up that way. He didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve me.”

You’re right, Nolan doesn’t say.

***

Nolan memorizes every phone number he’s ever found for Tyler Barrol.

He just doesn’t know if he’d be able to live with himself if he ever called.


End file.
